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Does Free Exercise of Religion Deserve Constitutional Mention? John M Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Journal Articles Publications 2009 Does Free Exercise of Religion Deserve Constitutional Mention? John M. Finnis Notre Dame Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Natural Law Commons, and the Religion Law Commons Recommended Citation John M. Finnis, Does Free Exercise of Religion Deserve Constitutional Mention?, 54 Am. J. Juris. 41 (2009). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/863 This Lecture is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DOES FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION DESERVE CONSTITUTIONAL MENTION? JOHN FRNNIS I John Dewey was born in 1859, the year that saw the publication-celebrated worldwide this 150th anniversary-of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. I value the opportunity to address you today under the distinguished auspices of Dewey, though it is Darwin, I shall argue, who is the better guide when we try to think about the place of religion in a society that aspires to be fair and sustainable. The question whether such a society would include the free exercise of religion among its constitutional guarantees has recently become a focus of debate amongst legal philosophers. The philosophy of law-the frame for this series of endowed lectures-is in some ways the most humble, low-level of philosophy's branches. But that same lowliness entails that one cannot do legal philosophy well without investigating and taking positions in all the higher levels and domains of practical philosophy, not to mention the epistemology and metaphysics which practical philosophy partly presupposes and partly informs. So legal philosophy is like law and lawyering: a place where all the great questions come to a head and become truly practical-a place proximate to decisions and actions affecting real persons and their lives and fortunes, decisions and actions whose rational soundness will depend on access-through culture, insight, or philosophy-to the deepest principles of morality and most strategic truths about human beings and their environment. So: a privileged place to work in. In the debate I mentioned, some contemporary American legal and constitutional theorists hold that there is nothing about religion or its free exercise that calls for particular respect, or any mention in constitutional bills of rights. That is the thesis which my lecture concerns. Religion, these theorists hold, has no such dignity, though (they add) history's testimony to the vulnerability of religions or their adherents, especially their vulnerability to oppression by other faiths, helps explain and in a weak sense justify the First Amendment's denial of Congressional power to make law either "respecting an establishment of religion" or "prohibiting the free thereof." Ronald Dworkin is a principal proponent of the thesis,2 but its most energetic 1. This paper was first delivered as the annual John Dewey Lecture at the University of Minnesota Law School in March 2009. 2. Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF JURISPRUDENCE Vol. 54 exponents over the past fifteen years have been Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager, whose joint work culminates in their book Religious Freedom and the Constitution. The book argues for a principle they call "Equal Liberty," a principle which is demanded by fairness in religiously diverse societies and which "denies that religion is a ... category of human experience that demands special benefits and/or necessitates special restrictions,"4 or any "special immunity for religiously motivated conduct."5 In Eisgruber and Sager's theory or principle of the "Equal Liberty" there is much that may seem welcome. They argue strenuously against the metaphor of "separation of Church and State," and their theory equally discredits not only that slogan but also the once prevailing Supreme Court interpretation of "no establishment of religion" that forbad any state aid to religious or religiously affiliated enterprises. They offer to defend, not a secularism that would reject, exclude or disparage religion, but what they see as the healthy secularity of non-religious institutions-say, secular public schools-which while declining to be (and prohibited from being) "overtly or specifically religious," "aspire to constitute a practical realm in which various competing ... philosophical and religious views may coexist and constructively interact."7 They have no time for Rawlsian proposals to expel from the public domain all religious arguments or grounds for decision-making;8 they share, I think, Dworkin's (and Joseph Raz's) healthy scepticism about that ramshackle Rawlsian proj ect-he calls it "political liberalism"-which in all really important decisions about human rights and the common good would banish concern for truth and in its place put an imaginary overlapping consensus of the "reasonable" views of all "reasonable" people (views supposedly identifiable as reasonable without reflection on their truth). They hold-rightly, I think-that in these matters neutrality is not an option. As to free exercise of religion, Eisgruber and Sager support the approach in Employment Division v. Smith,9 the Peyote case, upholding "neutral and generally applicable" laws even when they happen to restrict some religious practice and no "compelling state interest" required them to do so. That 134; Dworkin, Is Democracy PossibleHere? Principlesfor a New PoliticalDebate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 60-62. 3. Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager, Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2007. 4. Ibid., 6. 5. Ibid., 13. 6. Ibid., 313. 7. Ibid., 216 (emphasis added). 8. See ibid., 48-50 (not explicitly mentioning Rawls's "political liberalism") 9. 494 U.S. 872, 890 (1990), Scalia, J. for the Court. 2009 JOHN FINNIS approach is much less welcome to many who recognize the particular good of religion and religious liberty, but when I revisit it later in this lecture I will not be arguing against it. Yet for all this, the over-arching theory of Equal Liberty proposed by Eisgruber and Sager is, I think, radically unsound, at the very least insofar as it denies to religion and religious liberty any moral or constitutional status distinct from other "deep commitments." Their theory's first exposition was entitled "The Vulnerability of Consciences: The Constitutional Basis for Protecting Religious Conduct."' But the title can give a mistaken impression of their central thesis. For they deny that conscience as the rational faculty of practical judgment has any more claim than religion to constitutional privilege or even protection." Rather, the proper object of constitutional protection is any "deep concern," any and all "deeply" motivated and self-shaping attitudes and behavior. Whether or not these are religious or even conscientious, all alike are entitled to "equal regard." There is, they say, a "grand diversity of relationships, affiliations, activities, and passions that share a constitutional presumption of legitimacy" because in them members of "a modern, pluralistic society... find their identities, shape their values, and live the most valuable moments of their lives."' 2 Religious acts, they concede, have the same dignity and constitutional status as the "relationships, affiliations, activities and passions" under discussion. Their article did not say how far this wider category extends, and their book, too, is not much concerned to clarify the matter. But it does make clear that, in their view, the freedom of a religious association such as the Catholic Church to maintain a male priesthood is defensible only as an instance of the constitutional principle that "there are a variety of personal relationships in which members of our political community are free to choose their partners [as in Lawrence v. Texas], associates or colleagues without interference from the state."' 3 And their 1994 article had several times explicated the phrase "deep concern(s)" (which in the book is usually rendered "deep commitment(s)") as including "passionate" acts and relationships. '" 10. University of Chicago Law Review 61 (1994): 1245-1315. 11. Ibid., 1263, 1268-70. 12. Ibid., 1266. In truth, identities are shaped, not merely found, and values are found (or imagined) not merely shaped. 13. Religious Freedom and the Constitution, 65; Lawrence v Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), involving partnership in casual homosexual sodomy, is cited on the preceding page. 14. "The Vulnerability of Consciences," 1283. At the very outset (1245n), the authors say that "an important theme of this essay is that religion does not exhaust the commitments and passions that move human beings in deep and valuable ways." THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF JURISPRUDENCE Vol. 54 Eisgruber and Sager are right to hold that religion, if it is (as they think)just one among the deep passions and commitments that move people, does not deserve constitutional mention on account of any special dignity or value. True, this hypothesis does not warrant their conclusion that mention of religion in constitutions is defensible-if at all-only because religious people (the authors always seem to assume religious majorities)have been so beastly to each other (they assume, to minority religions) so often that historical constitution-makers could reasonably treat the exercise of religion as needing protection just because specially vulnerable to religiously motivated discrimination. For the argument forgets the threat to religious practice that can come from atheist or other secularist hostility to religion. But much more important is the hypothesis itself: that religion is just one deep and passionate commitment amongst others. This is lethal to religion, and I want to try to show why. Before setting out my positive argumentation, I think it is fair to remark that theirs is a thoroughly external view.
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